Aspiring to be Yourself with Grandma

news.blizzard.com:

Every Pride Month, communities around the world celebrate and accentuate why it’s important to give visibility to everyone in the LGBTQ+ community. Overwatch Creator Dani Ellis— better known as Grandma—knows why Overwatch is a place where the LGBTQ+ community can feel openly represented in the game and be part of the gaming community. We talked with Grandma about why this matters, and how she expresses herself to her community on her stream at twitch.tv/grandma.

Hello Grandma! Can you introduce and share with us who you are?

My name is Grandma, though my actual name is Dani. I consider myself a veteran gamer, as I have been playing games since I was 4 years old. Aside from video games, I love to create artwork. I like drawing people, I like drawing comics, and just putting my silly thoughts out there in the world.

How did you get the name Grandma as content creator?

It’s kind of a funny story! The first person I ever watched on Twitch was Fareeha because she was a Pharah main, and my sister said, “Hey you play Pharah, I think you would really like this person.” So, I got really involved with Fareeha’s community, and after about a year I started moderating the chat for her. At the time I had a different name on Twitch; I wasn’t known as Grandma.

One day, this person was in her chat, being a bit of a jerk. I was telling him to knock it off, and he said, “Shut up you stupid kid.” Everyone else started laughing, because everyone knew that I was in my thirties, which in the gaming world is basically geriatric. Someone else said, “What you do mean ‘kid,’ she’s basically the chat grandma.” So, the nickname “chat grandma” continued, and it just kind of stuck. When I decided to start streaming, Grandma was a cute name to have, so I swapped over.

That’s a fun story! So why do you like to play Overwatch 2?

Overwatch is generally not like any game I played before. I never had any interest in playing FPS games before this. I was a story gamer, which meant I played mostly JRPGs or